


Counting Stars

by katmarajade



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Holidays, M/M, Riverside, Stargazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-16
Updated: 2014-03-16
Packaged: 2018-01-16 00:02:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1324186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katmarajade/pseuds/katmarajade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim and Leonard look up at the stars and Leonard has an epiphany.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Counting Stars

Leonard's revelation came during his second year at the Academy when he went home with Jim for Christmas. He'd been disappointed when Jocelyn had informed him that she and Joanna would be going on a cruise with her parents for the week of Christmas. Jim had slapped him on the back, poured him a hearty dose of bourbon, and told him he was coming to Iowa with him.

After dinner, they snuck outside to escape Jim's mother's fussing and his three nephews who were on a sugar high from Winona's cookies. The sky was clear, the air cold, but there was no snow, no wind. Peaceful. They lay looking up at the stars.

"One day I'm going to see them all," said Jim, raising a hand to gesture vaguely from point to point in the endless sky. "When I was a kid, I used to come out here. Mom was gone and our stepfather was … well, I didn't stay home much. On nights when I had to get out of there, I'd come lie out here looking up. I'd memorized all the star charts early. It made me feel closer to my dad somehow. I was sure he'd known every star, every planet. In my kid head, my father knew everything. And if I could only know the sky like he had then I could leave Iowa.

"I know it was never your dream and you don't like space much, which still makes this Starfleet decision of yours a little crazy, Bones, I'm just saying—but I … I just knew if I could get up there that I could own the sky. Not like control it or something, just be part of it. Like my whole future was spelled out in those stars if I was just able to figure out what they said.

"Of course then I got a hefty dose of teenage hormones and angst and became even more of a smart ass and forgot about that, but I've just been remembering lately. And being here with you brings it all back, you know?"

Leonard grunted an affirmation of sorts. He did know, actually. He knew better than the wide-eyed, cocky cadet lying next to him did.

To the rest of the world, it might not be obvious, but Leonard had always been a romantic at heart. He could remember his teenage years, remember lying on the cool Georgia grass, taking refuge from the muggy evening air.

He would stare up at the stars and see his whole future painted in twinkling lights. He'd been convinced that the love of his life was written in those stars. Then he'd met Jocelyn and just knew that she had been written into his starscape. Now he recognized she'd been only a brief shooting star, something short and bright that died too soon, but it had shone brightly while it lasted and left something even more beautiful as it died—his Joanna.

And he began to see that his love story, life story, whatever it was, wasn't even close to finished yet.

Because his heart told him (and his heart was rarely wrong) that this moment, he and Jim gazing up at the stars hoping to decipher their futures, that this had happened before.

Years before, Leonard as a happy-go-lucky, never-had-his-heart-broken, world-was-his-oyster romantic had been looking at the sky while fifteen hundred kilometers away in Riverside, Iowa, a scrappy, dirty-faced kid with plasma bright eyes had been looking up too.

One moment, two souls searching the same night sky, asking two different questions that years later would have the same answer.

Jim was meant to be up there and Leonard was meant to be wherever Jim was.

Their future was in the stars.  



End file.
